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Swedish journalist on the other side, upon sitting down two minutes later: “Where’s Putin?”

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Once he showed, a shudder went through the media seats. Someone popped up and pointed. The game was forgotten.

Out there, a bunch of famous millionaires stirring up an instant classic.

Up there, the expression of raw power.

As North Americans, we like to think we’re above that sort of attraction.

We like our politics reasonable. We like our world leaders seated in the stands with the rest of us, rather than up in the bird’s nest surrounded by hoods. We don’t like people who put the hammer down on minorities, stoke the humanitarian calamity in Syria and oversee a vast kleptocracy.

Well, we like to think that we like that.

When Putin showed up at Canada House on Friday, it was a frenzy. He stood up on a small stage, modeling his own wax statue. The Canadians on hand treated him like Jesus returned.

For one terrible moment, it seemed as if COC boss Marcel Aubut might embrace the tyrant.

“I want to tell you how much we appreciate what Russia is offering . . . great Games. Probably the best ever,” Aubut gushes.

Wait. What?

It is one thing to be polite. It is another to pawing the guy who has his foreign enemies radioactively poisoned.

Those on hand, their voices peaking like groupies, rushed forward for selfies. Putin’s expression does not change. He is not after love. He wants tribute. Canada is happy to provide.

Speed skater Brittany Schlusser gets up close for a shot. She looks great. Putin looks like he’s wearing his own death mask. The cutline of her shot: ‘I should’ve asked him to be my Valentine.”

As soon as she posts it to Twitter, Schlusser is immediately torn apart online. She deletes the shot. When the Winnipeg Free Press gets hold of it, Schlusser tweets at them: “I see you put up my tweet w/ Putin. To be clear I was joking + in now way want to be misconstrued as supporting his values.”

Well, who could ever think that?!

Watching Putin in action here is helping me understand Mayor Rob Ford, and the way so many people in Toronto react to him. Wherever Putin goes, it’s a similar showing of wobbly knees.

One major exception — Russians. They won’t go anywhere near Putin. Unlike the tourists, they know enough to be afraid.

As Canadians, we are children in the world. We do not suffer. We do not want. In Toronto, our biggest civic issue is transportation. Eighty per cent of the rest of the world is thinking, ‘How will I eat today?’ and we’re thinking, ‘The Gardiner is blocking my view of the lake.’

As nice people who care, we can afford to be attracted to bad people who don’t.

That’s the essence of Ford’s celebrity — he doesn’t care. He exists outside our normative values. He does bad things. He apologizes. Then he does them again.

For some, it’s appalling; for others it’s amusing; and for a very large segment of us, apparently, it’s viscerally attractive.

We want to be near that sort of aberrance, to touch it, to get a photo. As the mostly good, we are fascinated by the mostly bad. Especially when they get away with it.

Putin is working the Fordian angle here, but on a vastly different scale.

Where Ford is feckless, Putin is purposeful. Where Ford is bumptious, Putin is regal. And where Ford is kind of a knob, Putin is full-on evil.

Imagine someone rushing into the arms of Angela Merkel or Xi Jinping or even Barack Obama. Nobody would. Their power creates respect and, therefore, distance.

Putin’s power is that of a strongman. He rules through a personality cult. Without trying, he charms you. People need to touch that.

Even though the average Canadian here has no idea what Putin is really about, they instinctively sense it — the combination of power and malice.

When you’re nice people from a nice country, it is apparently intoxicating. So much for making a stand for our values.

Before Sochi began, people referred to them as Putin’s Games, in the sense he would take the political credit. It instead has become Putin’s Games, in the sense that he is their biggest star.

Wasn’t this the guy we came to tell off? Weren’t we going to make a real show of standing up for gay rights and common decency?

That was a good plan, until we got up close enough to smell him, and then started swooning.

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